Positive Liberty

This is the second in a series of critical reconsiderations on academic history. Below the fold I will outline an approach to historiography. I don’t expect readers to find it any more interesting than my previous post, which attracted little attention.

Let’s start with a passage from one of Voltaire’s letters. The context is a 1765 strike by the Comédie-Française in favor of civil equality for actors and actresses. In support of their protest, Voltaire wrote,

It is true that we may convince the actors to continue playing despite the persecution, because the fear of an unjust excommunication must never prevent someone from doing his duty. But this proposition having been condemned by the Jesuit brothers, and by the Pope, it could be entirely possible that spectacles will be lacking in Paris, for fear of being excommunicated by the archbishop.

No, it doesn’t make sense. And that’s just the point. Voltaire seems to be flailing away at something just offstage, but the audience never quite sees it. Here begins the work of history.

To understand the quote, let’s first look at the background to the strike. At the time, most stage players could neither receive communion nor marry. The theater was understood, in the official justifications of the policy, as a school for bad morals. Actors and actresses showed people how to be adulterous, murderous, treacherous folk — and the audiences even applauded them for it. So, excommunication.

No, the policy wasn’t a perfect fit with the government’s stated goal: Playwrights, theater architects, musicians, critics, and ticket vendors were all exempted from the ban. Never mind, supporters said, this is a good policy, because its heart is in the right place. Politics — as always — is the art of the possible, and we have done what we can to promote good morals. Historian John McManners has called it a “resolutely defended contradiction,” and I think his term is apt.

Excommunicates received no sacraments, and, because of the ways that Church and State were hopelessly entangled, they also lost what few civil liberties and privileges could still be had in absolutist France. (Rights, which we might define as recognized and universal claims against the power of the government, did not exist. No one, not even the king, had “rights” in the modern sense.) But the actors enjoyed a civil status still lower than this, one that persisted even beyond their deaths: Stage players could not be buried in Catholic cemeteries, which were effectively all French cemeteries at the time. Thus Adrienne Lecouvreur (about whom quite little is available on the Internet), the greatest actress of her generation, was buried on the banks of the Seine in a hasty and improvised manner.

The actors of the mid-18th century had no wish to meet her fate, and Voltaire — a playwright and a critic of the Church — sided firmly with them. His quip begins to make sense when we learn that the papacy and the Jesuits had both at various times been enthusiastic supporters of the stage. Even while the French Church excommunicated stage players, the Roman Church tolerated them (in the intervening years, national churches have lost most of the independence they once had, but this is beyond the scope of our story).

Say whatever you would about the immorality of French actors, popes and Jesuits — particularly in Rome — had written many plays and musical entertainments, and the latter had sometimes even appeared onstage in person. Meanwhile, the Gallican Church prided itself on having the greater moral austerity, and on being rigorous enough to exclude even those things which the Roman court permitted. Moral one-upsmanship is nothing new in politics, and Voltaire acted here to expose the hypocrisy of the local moralists.

But the real heart of Voltaire’s remark lies in the seemingly innocuous passage “an unjust excommunication must never prevent someone from doing his duty.” The 1713 papal bull Unigenitus had condemned these exact words, and they had first appeared in a book that was popular with a group of heretics known as Jansenists, Pasquier Quesnel’s Reflexions morales.

The great irony of all of this — and the near-certain reason that Voltaire wrote the way he did — was that, while this proposition was certainly dear to Jansenists, the Jansenists themselves detested the theater. And perhaps the only thing they detested more than the theater was the overwhelming power, as they saw it, of the Jesuits and of their allies among the popes.

Beyond than any other identifiable religious or political faction in France, the Jansenists had agitated for and supported the Gallican Church’s excommunication of stage players. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to write that much of the Gallican Church’s rigorism during this era was a direct product of its struggles to re-integrate Jansenists into the Catholic mainstream: By enforcing the Jansenists’ moral positions — if not their somewhat arcane theological opinions — the Gallican Church hoped to bring the restless believers back to the fold. The actors were innocent bystanders in a nationwide power struggle, and Voltaire knew it.

One final reason that this comment is so notable is that Voltaire’s own brother was a Jansenist, a presumptive believer in the condemned proposition — and yet a presumptive opponent of the stage. Not only that, but he also believed with an embarrassing fervor in a number of purported faith healings that even mainstream Jansenists, such as there were, tended to doubt.

All of this was a huge embarrassment to the family’s famous skeptic. In just a few short words, then, Voltaire juxtaposed some of the most wildly disparate elements of the society around him: Jesuits and Jansenists, stage players and those who persecuted them, the papacy, the Gallican Church, and the absolutist state. Those in favor of the ban found themselves quoted in opposition; those who opposed the ban suddenly might have reason to cheer the opposite side. What the pope — then the pro-Jesuit but anti-Enlightenment Clement XIII — might have thought is unknown; it is unlikely that he ever saw the quip.

Even Voltaire’s Jansenist brother can be said to lurk in the background of this passage; elsewhere, Voltaire had likened the Jansenist miracles (unfavorably) to actors on a stage — even while, in his political interventions, the great infidel consistently supported the actors’ cause against the quasi-united forces of the Jansenists, the mainstream Gallican Church, and the absolutist state. It takes a supple mind to defend the actors’ cause while condemning another group for appearing all too thespian, but I digress.

This, I submit, is what real history is like. It’s full of messy contradictions, creative redeployments, and multiple overlapping sets of values and interests. Generally speaking, historical actors do not act for “a” reason — they act with many reasons, some serious and near at hand — others fanciful or distant.

I don’t think that most academic history takes this aspect of the past seriously enough. The real work of the historian, we are often told, is to make an argument about the past. We are asked to present one facet of historical action, to the exclusion of all else. I believe that — despite all our talk about thick description — a great deal of our practice suffers from the search after the single cause. Does anyone in life ever act for a single cause? I have multiple reasons when I go out for coffee, let alone when I do anything important. History could be more true to life by recapturing this multiplicity.

My own work has been criticized at times for failing to be about any one thing in particular. “You tell great stories,” I have often heard, “but you argue too many things at once.” Or about the very same paper, I might hear, “There is some great writing in here, but there is no argument to it at all.” You would think it had to be one or the other.

The problem is really quite simple, though: Where historical writing is often written to prove a point (typically in one of the theoretical realms mentioned in my previous post), historical action is never performed for similar reasons. Historical figures live and act in a relentlessly multifarious matrix of values, beliefs, and possibilities. They link and unlink their purposes at will. They do things that they know they ought not to do by any rational standard at all; they do things that they themselves could never explain. They improvise. They act on perponderances of motives — and sometimes on no motives whatsoever.

The most interesting historical actors do all of this the most brilliantly, as Voltaire did with his quote from Unigenitus. Following after them, whether they are lofty philosophes like Voltaire, or whether they are the poor artisans of Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre, should be the real work of historians, not a diversion or an unserious curiosity of the trade.

Historians should be artists above all things, and they should be artists of explanation, not arguers for one or another point in our endless and overly parochial debates. Using an eighteenth-century newspaper to prove a point about gender is like using a daffodil to prove a point about the wavelength of the color yellow. You can do it, of course — but it isn’t art. It doesn’t even make for a decent narrative. It also hurts the profession: Why don’t ordinary people read academic history? Beyond academic prose (a subject covered in Part I), it’s the lack of a good story that alienates us from the general public.

Academic monographs, and especially academic articles, tend to suffer from the habit of writing history as mere argument, rather than writing history as art. For an article to be judged a success, it must participate in a historiographic debate. Yet often the general public will not even know that such a debate exists. This is not the way to win greater interest in our work, and if historians want to reverse the rampant de-professionalization of the field, they have no choice but to go public. Write histories that people want to read, and people will pay us for writing them again.

This isn’t so hard as it sounds, and whole segments of the profession already act more or less along the lines I imagine: Biographies are relatively unscathed — and relatively popular. Part of this comes from sheer practicality: It’s much harder, I think, to flatten an entire life into a single argument about a single causal factor in history. Biographies also tend to be written by more senior academics, those who can take chances, rise above the fray of argument-history, and even — dare I say it — get away with rambling a bit.

Another example of the kind of history I think we need more of is Simon Schama. Howls of outrage all around, yes, I know. Academics can’t stand him, and I personally have caught Schama in a couple of published errors, but I admire his delight in particularity. I admire his personal, evocative histories that do not merely intervene in historiographic debates, but that give us a sense of what the past might really have been like. They give a sense, however fleeting, of a real, accessible past.

Does he get things right? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Like anyone else who has tried. Some curmudgeons will insist that this semblance of the past is merely an illusion, and that we ought not even try. I wish I understood this position, but I cannot: As long as we bring to the effort a reasonable willingness to revise and reconsider, there is nothing wrong with wanting a vivid, lifelike vision of the past.

I’ll have more to say about Schama in the near future, but for right now I’d like to close by challenging those historians who are still reading the blog efforts of a (now mostly failed) member of their profession: Write things because they are worth reading, because they are thought-provoking and beautiful, and try a little less hard to score points among yourselves. You might be surprised at the results.

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